Schedule Chicken

[Source unknown] … as a much smaller institution such practices were either legitimate or relatively harmless for the size of the company. Some of those habits become vices, however, as the company scales larger and larger. One such iniquity is a process dubbed “schedule chicken.”

Like many of my time, my first exposure to the game of chicken was viewing the classic scene from Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause. In that scene, Judy (Natalie Wood) and Jim (James Dean) were reaching achingly for each other’s outstretched hands while their tears dropped over the Malibu cliffs into the dark abyss below-and onto her (now permanently ex-) boyfriend Buzz (Corey Allen) and his Chevy. You see, Jim and Buzz were matched up to race their hot-rods over the fateful cliff and were supposed to jump out just in the last instant before their cars went over the edge. The first one to jump out of the car would be labeled a “chicken,” while the one closest to the edge would win bragging and (implicitly, anyway) Judy plucking rights. Jim jumped out okay, but the strap from Buzz’s leather jacket caught in the door handle, and he ended up in the third category of outcome: He missed the code complete date, he slipped the ship, tanked the target date-basically, Buzz bogeyed the bug bounce.

The software project equivalence happens when two or more areas of a product claim they can deliver their features at a ridiculously early date because each assumes the other feature area team is lying even worse about how long it will take them to deliver their features. This charade marches forward past one psychedelic checkpoint after another until just before the goods are actually due. A more seasoned team lead will delay copping to what is painfully obvious for as long as humanly possible, hoping someone else will break first and jump out of their car. The ceremony where the team lead has to admit the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes results in a tribal ritual that rivals Inca sacrifices, except that the virgin probably felt better about her fate. It is very difficult for the offending feature team to recover from being the furthest out on the schedule-because now that the truth is known, all everyone else has to do to look good is to finish just before that late team. Even if the schedule chickens end up beating the deadline, it is nearly impossible for the people on that team to beat the stigma of being unable to stay on a schedule.